


Death of an Angel

by Schaden_freude



Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine
Genre: Canon Compliant, Drabble, Gen, musings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:46:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26340616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schaden_freude/pseuds/Schaden_freude
Summary: Tom's musings about demons, angels, and the studio.
Relationships: Allison Angel & Tom
Kudos: 7





	Death of an Angel

Tom had always wanted to be the one to kill Alice. 

He had daydreamed, fantasized about getting his hands around her slimy little throat, squeezing the life out of her, watching her eyes roll up and go blank. 

How satisfying it would have been, after everything she’s done to him. Done to other Borises. Done to everyone. Tom still had memories of waking up on that operating table. His chest was ripped open but he was still alive because of the IV drip feeding ink into his body. And when she took his arm, sliced it off the way you might slice a loaf of bread -- you just don’t forget that kind of pain. 

Now, every time he looked at his mechanical arm, fixed it, marveled at it, flexed the joints on the fingers, he remembered that pain and resolved again to kill Alice. How strange the mechanical hand looked on his toon body; so out of place. What a strange look for Boris--

No, not Boris. My name is Tom, he told himself, over and over again. My name is Thomas Connor. And he would look over at the other Alice Angel, at his partner and sole companion in this hell: And that’s Allison Pendle. 

And the Twisted Alice was really Susie Campbell. It was getting harder and harder each day to remember the names. Which is why Tom repeated them over and over, like a laundry list, until they became meaningless to him. 

When Tom fought the Searchers, or ripped into the inky flesh of a butcher gang member to get that last can of soup, he imagined it was Alice’s flesh, and something inside him would come alive. Allison could always tell when he was doing this because his muscles tensed and his teeth bared in a very un-boris like fashion. So after the battle she would seize his arm and rub his back and whisper soft, sweet nothings to calm him down. 

Because Allison was afraid of the Tom that he could be. 

Of course Tom knew, and Allison knew, that Alice or Susie or whoever she was, was a victim like the rest of them. After all, she had been human too; taken in by Joey Drew’s remarkable charisma and endless dreams. Alice was an inky prisoner like the rest; she had merely twisted her imprisonment into a creation of her own. 

The truth was that Alice was a stand-in for Bendy.   
The ink demon terrorized the studio. The searchers, the butcher gang, even the destructive Sammy Lawrence feared him. In this world, the ink demon was god. 

Some theorized that if one could only kill Bendy, the nightmare would end, the studio would open, and they could all go home. Or die. Whichever came first. Kill the demon, set us free. 

But Bendy was unkillable. First of all he was never around when you wanted to find him. He seemed to exist only in the corner of one’s eye, in the moments when your guard was down. Second, hardly anyone challenged Bendy and lived. 

That was how Allison found Tom, actually. He had been living by himself, tucked away in a little miracle station, hoarding any food and tools he could find, avoiding the demon and the searchers and the angel. It was a miserable existence, but it was existence. 

Until Tom decided that existence just wasn’t good enough anymore. So he challenged the ink demon. 

It was a kind of wild, crazy idea, but if killing Bendy really set them free, it would be worth it. So Tom attacked Bendy with all he had, his entire being. 

Allison had to save him, of course. Because no one fought the ink demon and lived. It was sheer luck and coincidence that Allison had passed by on her own search mission, had seen the fight and contrived a plan to save Tom from certain doom. 

That was how they met (again). And they’d been sticking together ever since. Hell was much easier when you weren’t alone. 

Tom couldn’t kill Bendy, and had since then given up trying. The truth was he felt ashamed. He had told Allison that he had tried to kill Bendy to set them all free. But such a task was suicide and they both knew perfectly well why he had faced the demon. 

Tom’s hatred for Bendy eclipsed even his hatred of Alice. But only one of them was killable. 

He had never really told Allison what Alice did to him, at least not in detail. He didn’t need to. Were not the Boris corpses strewn over the studio detail enough? Wasn’t he lucky to escape, lucky to be alive, even if life was too difficult to bear? 

No. Life wasn’t good enough for Tom. He needed to thrive, and to thrive he needed to kill Alice. 

Tom had never really asked about Allison’s experiences when she was by herself in the studio, and she never offered to tell. He got the impression she had done regrettable things, things not so easily forgiven. Maybe that was a trait of all angels.

That was why it was so surprising when Allison killed Alice. 

The moment was burned into Tom’s brain forever: the twisted angel frozen in shock and pain, barely able to look down at the blade that impaled her. And Allison’s face. 

From Tom’s vantage point, he saw Henry, the only human to have entered the studio in years, somehow survive Brute Boris, one of Alice’s many cruel experiments. Beaten within an inch of his life, there was no way Henry could have fought off Alice as she stormed towards him, infuriated that he had destroyed her Boris, anxious to have her hands around his throat. To hell with the demon’s obsession, she would kill him herself. 

And then Allison moved faster than Tom could have stopped her. Within seconds her knife plunged into Alice’s back. Henry’s eyes were fixed with shock on the dead angel, but Tom had been watching Allison’s face. 

There was a rage there that he recognized. Not a vengeful, suicidal rage, like he had. It was a cool righteous rage, for all the dead Borises and the suffering Searchers. Rage for Jack Fain and Lacie Benton and all the others who never left. Every single goddamn thing that had ever happened to them in this studio was in that single stab. It was as if she had impaled Joey Drew himself. 

The rage was also for him, Tom realized. Susie Campbell may have been a victim too, may have been human too, but that didn’t excuse what she had done. Allison’s rage was for Tom’s arm. For his sanity. 

Yes, Alice’s death was a turning point. After that they took in Henry, and their life in the studio transformed. Tom still wished, now and then, that he might have killed Alice himself. How satisfying it would have been. 

But then he looked at Allison. And he knew who the real murderer was.


End file.
